Bates College Selects Clayton Spencer for New President

Clayton Spencer, the vice president for policy at Harvard University, has been named the eighth president of Bates College, a small liberal arts institution in Lewiston, Me., effective July 1.


Ms. Spencer has served at Harvard since 1997, under four presidents; before that she was chief education counsel in the United States Senate.


Born in North Carolina, Ms. Spencer graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, where she serves as a trustee, and Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, winner of the moot court competition and chairwoman of the Public Interest Council. She practiced law at Ropes & Gray in Boston, then served as an assistant United States attorney in Boston before going to work on Capitol Hill.


Ms. Spencer, 56, whose full name is Ava Clayton Spencer, is a second-generation college president. Her father, Samuel Reid Spencer Jr., a Harvard-educated historian, served as president of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va., from 1957 to 1968 and Davidson College in North Carolina from 1968 to 1983.


The school's trustees elected Ava Clayton Spencer as Bates' eighth president on Sunday. Spencer, of Winchester, Mass., begins work on July 1.
Spencer is vice president for policy at Harvard, where she works closely with the president and deans. She previously served as executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was a lecturer at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.
Spencer graduated magna cum laude from Williams College and earned a theology degree from Oxford in 1979. She received a master's degree in the study of religion from Harvard in 1982.
Spencer will succeed Nancy Cable, Bates' interim president since July 1. Former Bates President Elaine Hansen stepped down from the position last June.